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Chapter 39: Fire at the Scriptorium!
“The whole commercial area could go up in flames,” a street vendor yelled at Trask. “Do something!”
Trask glared at them and walked down the City Hall stairs at his usual, deliberate pace. What did they expect him to do? He wasn’t a trained fire fighter.
“Do you know what Binkie and Gully would probably say?” he asked Matilda. “That the fire will cause residents to spend more money on rebuilding. And if they die horribly as they’re burned alive, well, they’ll need to buy whole new avatars.”
“Uh huh,” Matilda said, her eyes scanning the crowd for threats. The street vendor stopped grumbling when her eyes fell on them.
Maybe Boozy Beau’s had it right, Trask thought. Drink yourself into oblivion and then curl up in a nice gutter.
The board would vote the next day no matter what Trask did or didn’t do tonight. Krim would either change or it wouldn’t change. The fire would either spread and burn down the whole city, or it wouldn’t.
A bunch of crazy people were running around Krim, shooting at tourists, setting random fires. None of it made sense. He was doing the best he could and if that wasn’t enough, well…
They got to the pie vendor before the stand closed up for the night, but Oswald the Merciless was reluctant to serve them.
“You should be fighting that fire, not eating pies,” he told Trask.
“I’m not a fire fighter,” Trask said. “I’m letting the professionals handle it. How many pies do you have left?”
Oswald grumbled, but opened the door on the warming oven. “Four meat, three fish, ten cabbage… more or less.”
“I’ll take all of them.”
“Oh, you’re bringing food to the firefighters,” Oswald said. “You should have said so.”
Trask didn’t contradict him. And you never knew. There might be a pie or two left for them.
Oswald expertly folded a sheet of old newspaper into a large cone. “I hope the fire doesn’t spread,” he said. “What with the griefing, all the supply issues, and idiot management making things worse at every turn, it’s a miracle that Krim hasn’t gone out of business already.”
“There are plenty of other grids like Krim,” said Trask.
“No, there aren’t,” said Oswald. “Do you know why I picked this place after my stroke?”
“No,” said Trask.
“Well, look at the options. I could get a place on Facepage. One of those apartments that redecorates itself every time my mood changes, with a back porch looking out over Mount Everest and the front windows looking out onto Main Street.”
“I like those apartments,” said Trask.
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s like being in a screensaver,” said Oswald. “But here on Krim, I feel connected to the world. Plus, I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant. Do you know how hard it is to open a restaurant in the real world? Or even on Facepage? What the competition is like?”
“I’ve seen the statistics.” And Trask certainly heard enough people complaining about it in his former career. “So why aren’t you running a restaurant now, on Krim?” Opening a restaurant on the grid couldn’t be that expensive.
“I’m saving up money so I don’t have to dip into my retirement fund,” Oswald said. “And I’m finding out what people here want to eat. And who the best suppliers are. And perfecting my business model.” He patted the top of his cart. “This is basically my market research.”
Oswald passed the paper cone full of pies to Trask, then folded up a second one.
Trask felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. He couldn’t tell why. He himself didn’t want to open a pie shop. He didn’t want to serve pies to people. He wanted people to serve pies to him.
Was he jealous that Oswald was working on building something that he cared about? Or maybe it wasn’t jealousy that he felt. Maybe it was just pangs of hunger.
He took the second packet of pies from the vendor.
“It’s on the house,” Oswald said. “Go save the grid.”
The pies had only a little warmth left in them. He needed to eat them fast. Trask pulled out the first one as he walked through the plaza towards Banking Street.
“Running a restaurant on Krim isn’t even a real job,” he told Matilda after they finally made their way through the crowd and turned north towards the fire.
“Uh huh,” she said, her eyes scanning the area around them, occasionally flicking up to the windows and rooftops above.
“Here’s what I think a real job is,” Trask said, between bites of his pie. “You grow food, or create shelter, or clothing. In the real world, for real people.”
They passed the central gate wall and the street immediately got a little bit darker and emptier. The commercial area was on the north side of the central plaza, just beyond the central gate wall. Not too many people had business there after dark.
Matilda cast a quick glance at him. “I used to be a mixed martial arts fighter,” she said, eyes back on their surroundings.
Trask chewed his pie. There was a piece of gristle that needed extra attention.
Was being a mixed martial arts fighter a real job? Probably not, he thought. He decided not to say anything.
And what did he used to do? Mostly, Trask thought, he kept people from providing food, shelter and clothing to other people. He decided not to go there. Instead, he finished up the pies in the first paper cone.
“Hey, there’s Sidney,” he said. “Maybe she knows what’s going on.”
The newspaper editor was walking briskly towards them across the street and they met at the corner of Chantry Street and North Banking just before Trask and Matilda were about to turn left onto Chantry.
“What happened?” Sidney asked, just as Trask was about to ask what she knew about the fire.
“Scriptorium burned,” Matilda said. “Lots of flammable paper in there.” She pointed.
“I’m looking for Lucilicious,” Trask said.
He and Sidney both saw the fire chief at the same time, Joe standing next to her. The editor whipped out a notepad. Trask grabbed another pie.
“Someone dressed as an assassin threw a Molotov cocktail through an open window,” Lucilicious told them as they approached.
Trask stuffed the rest of the pie into his mouth, handed the cone to Joe, wiped his hands on his coat, and took out his own notepad.
“About two hours ago, at seven-fifteen, maybe seven-thirty,” the fire chief added.
“Mmm hmm,” Trask said, his mouth full. By “mmm hmm,” he meant that Molotov cocktails were not historically appropriate, and, when the perpetrator was found, there would be a fine.
“It landed in a pile of papers on someone’s desk in an unoccupied office, and the fire was going strong by the time anyone noticed,” Lucilicious added.
“There was an eyewitness standing around outside, but they didn’t say anything because they like to see things burn,” Joe said, peering into the paper wrapper. “Did you get any beef-and-onion?”
“I got all the pies that were left,” Trask told him. “Who was the eyewitness? Black Eyed Rawley? Barret?” There were quite a few people on Krim who liked to see things burn.
“Iron Fists,” said Lucilicious. “Left a few minutes ago.”
Trask nodded. “Hangs out at the King’s Armpit. I’ll have a chat later.”
“Said that the firebug ran off in the direction of the commercial gate. I’ll go nose around some more.” Joe pulled out a couple of pies, handed the rest back to Trask, then wandered off.
“I’ll have to check if the griefer actually went through the gate,” Trask said. “If they did, that changes things.”
“Yup,” said Lucilicious. “It would narrow the suspect list to people with commercial licenses. Might make this a deliberate act, not random.” She paused. “There’s another reason not to think this was a firebug. The buildings in this sector are all built solid, of stone. You don’t want to have a lot of flammable construction around warehouses full of grain and oil. I’m thiking that maybe this was a business customer with a grievance.” She glanced at Sidney. “Don’t print that yet. We don’t want to give the bad guy any notice that we’re coming for them.”
“Still doesn’t narrow the suspect list that much,” Trask said. “There must be hundreds of people with commercial gate privileges.”
Lucilicious nodded. “You’ve got the merchants and all their employees and contractors. Shipping companies. Other third-party logistics providers.”
“The scribes were working on tomorrow’s edition of AviNewz,” Sidney said. “Did everything burn?”
Lucilicious looked up at the building, where they could all still see flames through the windows and smoke pouring out from multiple exit points. “What do you think?”
“Any indication that the paper was the real target?” asked Sidney.
“Why would you think that?” Trask asked.
“You mean, other than the attempts to assassinate me, personally? And the fact that they already tried to burn down my building? How about the fact that we’re running Cyril’s expose of the who the investors are?”
“So he got the article to you before he died?” Trask asked.
“No, he finally contacted me today,” Sidney said. “He said that he learned some interesting things while he was in captivity. And he was right.”
She smiled, satisfied.
“Well? What was it?”
“You’ll have to read tomorrow’s paper and find out.” She looked at the scriptorium building. “Or maybe the day after that.” She shook her head. “If they burned the paper before KSL picked it up, we’ll have to redo it from backups. It will be the first time we missed an edition since we launched.”
“And it will be too late for the board to see it before their board meeting,” Trask said.
She looked at him. “It would be too late, anyway,” she said. “They moved the meeting up. Haven’t you heard? It’s going on right now.”